Chapter Three

 

 

 

“Please tell me you haven’t been standing there long.” Lex sat on the ground, leaning against the trunk of a large oak, his focus on a sculpture of man and a woman in the throes of passion, a tangle of arms and legs, mouths open in their ecstatic moment of release. Contemplating the statue and what he had been fantasizing when he’d created it had led him to his own release, though he hadn’t needed much help.

“I saw nothing, and even if I had, I wouldn’t tell you. I just assumed you’d be out here. V said you were in the Other Studio, and when you weren’t there, I figured you’d be here.” The Other Studio was what they had always called the barn at the edge of his private sculpture garden where he worked on nothing but erotic pieces. They were never intended for anyone else’s eyes. The art world that so admired his work had no idea that there was another facet to Alexander Valentine’s creativity. Masturbation in stone—that was what it was, he supposed—but it did help to create in marble what he knew he couldn’t have in the flesh.

“You all right?” Dillon asked.

He nodded, lifting his face to the late afternoon sun. “I’m better now, at least for a little while.”

“V said you were down here last night. She figured you must have been dreaming.” He came and sat across from Lex, leaning his back against the plinth of the sculpture.

Lex grunted. “The woman has to be an alien. I can’t fart without her knowing it and telling you the details.”

Dillon nodded. “I’m guessing in the early days I was abducted and equipped with a device that relays all relevant information about Alexander Valentine’s digestive history to the mother ship.”

“No doubt by means of an anal probe,” Lex commented.

“Those are the best kind.”

“You would know, I suppose. Now is there a reason you disturbed me in my masturbatory solitude, or are you just a pervert?”

“Well, I’m not just a pervert,” Dillon replied with a little tilt of his head as though he might have had to think about it for a second. “But there is a reason why I sought you out in your pleasure garden. I have two models I think are worth calling in for interviews. Do you want to meet with them or do you trust V and me with their interrogation?”

“Why don’t you two do it? I was the one who picked out Sally Philips after what I thought was a very thorough interrogation and you see where that got me.”

“Consider it done, bro.”

“So? Why are you still here, then? You’re disturbing my handiwork.”

“Well”—the man stretched long legs out in front of him and folded his arms across his chest—“I actually came out here because of your handiwork.”

“You really are a pervert.”

Dillon only shrugged and offered a wicked smile. “Nothing slow about you, bro.”

“What then?”

He folded his legs under him Indian style and scooted forward. “You remember when I told you I’d do a little research to see if I could maybe find you some help as a preventative for repetitive stress syndrome?”

“Hard to forget,” Lex said.

“You know my cousin, Andy?”

“What about him?” Lex had met the kid a couple of times. He knew that he was studying chemistry in Portland State at the moment, putting himself through the program with the aid of a couple scholarships and several part-time jobs. Lex had offered to help, but the man had wanted to do it himself. He respected that a lot.

“He knows this woman who’s a tutor.”

“A tutor? What, you mean like for chemistry?”

Dillon chuckled and cocked an eyebrow. “Well, I suppose you might be able to look at it that way, sort of, if you had a good imagination, but no. She’s a sex tutor.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Lex shoved his way to his feet and headed back toward the house. “I don’t think a cock doc can help me.”

“No, wait,” Dillon scrambled to join him. “Hear me out.” He caught up and fell into step next to Lex. “It’s not like you think. This woman’s policy is perfect for you. Apparently when she sees a client, it’s strictly no touch.”

“No touch? Seriously?”

Dillon nodded and continued. “She doesn’t touch anyone and they don’t touch her. She arrives clothed, remains clothed and leaves clothed, completely untouched. She doesn’t play with her clients, if you know what I mean. She advises and coaches. Very strictly hands off. Andy says the hands-off policy is the woman’s number one rule. The way she sees it, people’s sex issues won’t be solved by her feeling them up.”

“And how the hell would Andy know this woman?” Lex asked, slowing his pace as they came into sight of the house. He couldn’t help it. He was way more interested than he intended to be.

“He mows her lawn, and her secretary’s. Quite by accident, he ended up mowing the lawn of a couple who also happened to be her very satisfied clients, and he started doing a little investigating on his own. Apparently he wanted to be Casanova to some girl he’s dating. He was pretty closed-mouthed about it, but… Well, he did think of you.”

“Oh, that’s thoughtful,” Lex grumbled “Glad to know my eternal chub is mentioned in hushed tones on freshly mown lawns all across Portland.”

“Oh, don’t be a dick. You know Andy would never say anything. He only knows about your situation because he was here once when—”

“When I had a close encounter with the floor. Yes, I remember, but I don’t recall that I or anyone else had my cock in their hand when it happened.”

“It’s not about your cock,” Dillon said. “It’s about the fact that no one but you can touch said cock.”

“And therefore it’s about my cock. So what does your cousin think—that I should let this woman advise me while I slap the monkey?” The thought made him very uncomfortable, especially in the region of his crotch, which was quite disturbing. Too disturbing to even contemplate, and yet he found himself asking, “So your cousin’s just taking someone’s word?”

“Actually my cousin had a little encounter with our sex tutor last week, and apparently it was a rather life-changing experience.” Before Lex could ask, Dillon raised his hand. “All I know is that it involved a can of pear halves in heavy syrup out behind Eddie’s Supermarket, and, as a result, my awkward virgin of a cousin is suddenly getting laid on a regular basis, and quite well if I’m to believe the lucky bastard.”

“A can of pears?”

“I know it’s not exactly what you’d expect from a sex therapist, but that’s what he told me, with a shit-eating grin that practically split his face.”

For a moment, the two men walked in silence, Lex thinking about his midnight rendezvous with the statuary in his private garden. It hadn’t been so much sexual release he’d craved as intimacy, and for that there was no real substitute. He figured his raging libido was as much about his isolation as it was about sex, but he didn’t see how a sex therapist…er…tutor could help him with that.

“You don’t have to meet her in your home. I can call and set up an appointment for you and if she’s not okay with meeting you in a hotel room, you can meet her at my apartment. Hell, I stay here most of the time now anyway, so it’s free.” Before Lex could respond, he added, “Don’t worry, bro, I’ll check her out very carefully before I set anything up, and I’ll double-check with you before we go through with it. Even if you back out at the last minute, I’ll just pay the woman. Maybe pay her a little extra for the inconvenience and that’ll be that. No skin off anyone’s teeth, and no one is any worse for the wear, except maybe your poor aching hand.”

“You’re an asshole, you know that, Dil?” he said, as both men ascended the stone steps to the patio.

“So I’ve been told. Look, dude, I’d lend a hand if I could.”

“Hell, if you could make it all better, I’d for damn sure let you.”

“Shall I give this Kelly Blake a call, then?”

“Let me think about it.”

“All right. Just let me know.”

 

* * * *

 

It was well after midnight when Lex woke wet with sweat, heart racing from a dream he couldn’t remember—it wasn’t a nightmare. He always remembered the nightmare. It was always the same and it was far too terrifying for him to ever forget, though he wished like hell he could. He shoved his way from under the comforter, knowing sleep would elude him now. He pulled on a pair of training shorts and a ratty hoodie and slipped into the darkened hall barefoot, because he knew only too well how lightly V slept, and fucking Dillon wasn’t much better. He wished they didn’t worry so much. It wasn’t like there was anything they could do, and he functioned just fine—not normal by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, but he’d learned to compromise and improvise. He had his routine, and it worked for him. Thankfully he had the entire Valentine fortune to make sure he could compromise and improvise in style, if there was such a thing. And even more thankfully, he had a safety net of people, friends he could rely on to run interference when the shit hit the fan like it had with Sally Philips.

At the back of the house, he made his way through the kitchen, grabbing a couple of Cookie’s homemade snickerdoodles from the cookie jar and a bottle of water on his way out. There was a reason they called her Cookie. There was nothing she couldn’t do in the kitchen, and she kept them all very well fed. But her specialty was homemade cookies, and snickerdoodles were his favorites. They always turned up in the cookie jar the day after he’d had an incident, and they never lasted long. He considered them just what the doctor ordered. He did all right for himself, he thought, as he bit into one of the little delights, licking cinnamon and sugar off his lips. He managed. He stepped outside to find a heavy moon in the night sky and paused for a moment to look up at the stars before he made his way down to the Other Studio. It was always the Other Studio where he went when he woke in the middle of the night, even if it was the nightmare that disturbed his sleep. The Other Studio was purely escapism from his isolation. It was all erotic sculpture, though some of it bordered more on romance, and it was for his eyes only. His present work was a woman, naked except for an open chemise which exposed her high, firm breasts and the muscles of her belly tightened in arousal. One hand slid between her open legs and the other arm was thrown over her head. He now worked on her face trying to capture the tipping point when all the effort results in that ecstatic moment when there’s no turning back. She was his counterpart, he thought, caught in the perpetual need for release that never quite satisfies and unable to figure out why.

He slipped out of the hoodie and began to work on her expression. It was little more than a blank piece of stone at the moment. There was no emotion, no tension, none of the concentration that went with the effort of masturbating oneself to orgasm. As he worked, he recalled his dreams, or at least bits of them. There was a woman. She didn’t have a face either, he thought. At least he never saw it. He followed her into the sculpture garden, watched her unseen as she walked among his erotic works, stripping as she went, caressing a marble breast here, a stone cock there, and in between, as she stripped, as she touched and caressed his work, she touched and caressed herself, breasts warm and soft, nipples heavy with arousal, nearly as hard as the stone that turned them both on. And he wanted her. He wanted to trail his fingers along flesh and sinew, warm and giving under his palm. He wanted to curl his fist in her hair and pull her back to him, bruise her mouth with his. He wanted to lift her onto one of the stone plinths of the sculptures she caressed, open her thighs and look at her, touch her down there where it was only ever marble that he touched, down there where he only ever imagined the inner warmth of arousal. And when he had explored her with his eyes, with his hands, with his mouth, then he would take her hard and deep and pour all of what was trapped inside him into her, and she would willingly receive all that he gave.

With a jerk and a groan, he came back from the fantasy, fist tight around his cock, spilling himself onto the partially carved lips and down over the breasts of his creation. Christ, it always felt like it would rip him apart when it happened like this, when the dreams weren’t nightmares, but so full of longing that he felt nothing could ever fill the void. When he’d finished coming, he slid down onto the stone cold floor, fumbled his shorts up over his cock and fell asleep.

 

* * * *

 

“Here, bro. You look like you could use these.” Sunlight shown through the open windows of the studio and Dillon squatted next to him with a cup of coffee in one hand and his hoodie in the other.

“Fuck,” he mumbled shoving himself into a sitting position. He grabbed the hoodie and then the coffee, burning his tongue on the first eye-opening sip.

“You’re welcome.” Dillon sat down on the floor next to him with his own cup in hand. “Another hard night?”

“Fuck you,” Lex mumbled into his cup.

“In my dreams, dude, in my dreams.”

“A man ought to be able to have a wank in the privacy of his own home without the whole household interfering.”

“Shall I take the coffee back?”

Lex clutched the cup to his chest and growled at his friend, who only shrugged and sipped his own brew. They sat for a time in silence, surrounded by the scent of coffee, for which Lex was thankful. He hoped it would overpower the scent of sex, if he could even call what happened to him in these little episodes sex. But the coffee covered up nothing, not to Dillon. Though, bless the man, it was at least an effort to ease any embarrassment he might feel.

“Haven’t been able to get hold of either of the two models,” Dillon said.

“That’s going to set me back.”

“I’ll sort it shortly.”

“I’m sure you will. Thanks.”

Through the open door, the two watched a robin in the rose garden battling with a worm.

“You should come and have breakfast. Cookie’s making huckleberry pancakes.”

Huckleberry pancakes were his favorite and they were always a sign that everyone in the house, including Cookie, knew he’d had a rough night. But then they always knew, didn’t they?

“I need a quick shower first,” he said.

“Just don’t linger or I won’t promise there’ll be any left.” His friend finished his coffee and stood, motioning for Lex to do likewise.

At the kitchen door, Lex stopped and turned to face him. He took a deep breath and threw caution to the wind. “Why don’t you make me an appointment with the cock doc? I don’t suppose it can hurt. And don’t eat all the pancakes.” As he headed through the kitchen, he gave Cookie a wave. She waved a spatula at him and puffed a stray strand of dark hair out of her face.